Namita Gupta Wiggers is a writer, curator, and educator based in Portland, OR. She is the Director and Co-Founder of Critical Craft Forum, an on-line and on-site platform for exchange (Facebook group, @critcraftforum, www.criticalcraftforum.com). She teaches in M.F.A. Applied Craft + Design, a joint program of Oregon College of Art + Craft and Pacific Northwest College of Art. Wiggers served as the Director and Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Craft from 2004-14, where she curated over 65 exhibitions, doubled the collection holdings, revitalized the Gallery Store, and documented craft history through commissioned writing published in print and online. She contributes regularly to online and in-print journals and books, and serves as the Exhibition Reviews Editor, The Journal of Modern Craft and Editorial Board, Garland, a forthcoming publication from Australia. Her publications include: Unpacking the Collection: Selections from the Museum of Contemporary Craft (Museum of Contemporary Craft, 2008), Ken Shores: Clay Has the Last Word (Museum of Contemporary Craft, 2010), and Generations: Betty Feves (Museum of Contemporary Craft, 2012); essays in Contemporary Jewelry in Perspective (Lark Books, 2013), Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft (Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, 2010), Shows and Tales: On Jewelry Exhibition-Making (Art Jewelry Forum, 2015), and the forthcoming Ceramics in the Expanded Field (2016). Recent publications include editing a special issue, “Dimensions: Expanded Measures of Textiles” for Art Practical (2015). She is currently editing an anthology of writing on contemporary craft since 2000 for Wiley Blackwell Publishers. Wiggers lectures, conducts crits, workshops and seminars at institutions across the country, including: Bard College, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, California College of the Arts, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Indiana University, Oregon College of Art + Craft, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Tennessee Tech University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Western Carolina University, University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana, and University of Texas, El Paso. Selected lectures include: Studio Art Quilt Associates National Conference (2015); Surface Design Association Conference (2015); Booker-Lowe Lecture, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2014); Distinguished Lecture, National Council on the Ceramic Arts (2013), and the keynote at zimmerhoff, Germany (2012). Selected jury projects include: the GICBiennale 2015, Icheon, Korea and the European Ceramic Context, Bornholm, Denmark in 2014. Current and recent projects include: State of Oregon Craft with Nicole Nathan, Museum of Contemporary Craft; Across the Table, Across the Land with Michael Strand and in collaboration with NCECA's 50th Anniversary in 2016; a textile-focused exhibition at the Wing Luke Museum of Asian American Experience, Seattle; and a Maker Space project at the Patricia and Philip Frost Museum of Science, Miami, FL. Wiggers serves on the Board of Directors of the American Craft Council and The Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design.

Born in Silver Spring, Maryland, Kimberley was raised in the suburbs of the Metropolitan Washington, D.C. area. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts and Photography from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. During college, she was heavily involved with the Filipino American Student Association at UMBC and served as National Director and District VI Chair for Filipino Intercollegiate Networking Dialogue (F.I.N.D.). She was also a Principal dancer and Director of Operations for the 501(c)3 non-profit organization, Culture Shock Washington, D.C. She has worked with several arts youth and community outreach programs, including Banner Neighborhoods, Sitar Arts Center, and So Others Might Eat ( S.O.M.E.). Kimberley also recently served as Executive Producer for the 2013 International Choreographer’s Showcase held in Washington, D.C.

Kimberley currently resides in Daly City, California and is pursuing her M.F.A. in Art at San Francisco State University. She is the recipient of the 2014 Sher-Right Scholarship and 2014 Jack and Gertrude Murphy Award, administered by The San Francisco Foundation. She will be showing in an exhibition of the Murphy and Cadogan awardees at the SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco, California, opening on September 3, 2014.

Photograph by Joseph Mintz. 

Born in Silver Spring, Maryland, Kimberley was raised in the suburbs of the Metropolitan Washington, D.C. area. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts and Photography from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. During college, she was heavily involved with the Filipino American Student Association at UMBC and served as National Director and District VI Chair for Filipino Intercollegiate Networking Dialogue (F.I.N.D.). She was also a Principal dancer and Director of Operations for the 501(c)3 non-profit organization, Culture Shock Washington, D.C. She has worked with several arts youth and community outreach programs, including Banner Neighborhoods, Sitar Arts Center, and So Others Might Eat ( S.O.M.E.). Kimberley also recently served as Executive Producer for the 2013 International Choreographer’s Showcase held in Washington, D.C.

Kimberley currently resides in Daly City, California and is pursuing her M.F.A. in Art at San Francisco State University. She is the recipient of the 2014 Sher-Right Scholarship and 2014 Jack and Gertrude Murphy Award, administered by The San Francisco Foundation. She will be showing in an exhibition of the Murphy and Cadogan awardees at the SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco, California, opening on September 3, 2014.

Photograph by Joseph Mintz. 

Born in Silver Spring, Maryland, Kimberley was raised in the suburbs of the Metropolitan Washington, D.C. area. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts and Photography from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. During college, she was heavily involved with the Filipino American Student Association at UMBC and served as National Director and District VI Chair for Filipino Intercollegiate Networking Dialogue (F.I.N.D.). She was also a Principal dancer and Director of Operations for the 501(c)3 non-profit organization, Culture Shock Washington, D.C. She has worked with several arts youth and community outreach programs, including Banner Neighborhoods, Sitar Arts Center, and So Others Might Eat ( S.O.M.E.). Kimberley also recently served as Executive Producer for the 2013 International Choreographer’s Showcase held in Washington, D.C.

Kimberley currently resides in Daly City, California and is pursuing her M.F.A. in Art at San Francisco State University. She is the recipient of the 2014 Sher-Right Scholarship and 2014 Jack and Gertrude Murphy Award, administered by The San Francisco Foundation. She will be showing in an exhibition of the Murphy and Cadogan awardees at the SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco, California, opening on September 3, 2014.

Photograph by Joseph Mintz. 

Clare Counihan earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and her B.A. in English Literature from Duke University. Her research focuses on contemporary southern African experimental literature and the relationship between narrative form and national belonging for unbeloved subjects. She is also deeply interested in food: eating it, cooking it, understanding the ways it reflects and mediates our identities and interactions.

Sarita Echavez See was born in New York City but raised as an "embassy brat" moving from city to city around the world. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, where she first became involved with U.S. women of color politics, especially the arts and culture movement. She obtained her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. While studying in New York City, she met the Filipino American artists and writers who inspired and continue to inspire her teaching and scholarship. In 2013, she joined the faculty of the University of California, Riverside, where she is an associate professor of Media and Cultural Studies. She previously taught at Williams College, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California, Davis. Her research and teaching interests include Asian American and Filipino American cultural critique, postcolonial and empire studies, narrative, and theories of gender and sexuality. She is the author of the book-length study The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), in which she argues that contemporary Filipino American forms of aesthetic and performative abstraction powerfully expose and indict the history of American imperialism as itself a form of abstraction. She is at work on the book-length project “Against Accumulation,” which is a study of the politics of accumulation in the American museum and university and of the politics of anti-accumulation in Filipino American theatre, writing, and visual art. She was one of the core organizers of the 2011 conference "Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide" held at the University of California, Riverside, and she has served as a member of the working board of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association. In her work with the Center for Art and Thought and its focus on the contemporary medium of the digital, she envisions CA+T to be a transnational venue for more meaningful, reciprocal encounters between artists and scholars, and she is committed to fostering new forms of literacy, rather than tutelage, and to the transformation, rather than the mere transmission and replication, of knowledge.

Doreen Gamboa Fernandez was born on 28 October 1934 to Aguinaldo Severino Gamboa of Silay, Negros Occidental and Alicia Lucero Gamboa of Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija.

She obtained her A.B., major in English and History in 1954 from St. Scholastica's College, Manila and completed her M.A. in English Literature (1956) and Ph.D. in Literature (1976) from the Ateneo de Manila University. She began teaching at the Ateneo de Manila in 1972 and chaired the departments of Communication, English and Interdisciplinary Studies. She was a member of the editorial boards of Philippine Studies, Filipinas Journal of Philippine Studies, and The Asian Theatre Journal. She would have rendered thirty years service in October 2002.

In 1998 she was recognized with Metrobank Foundation's Outstanding Teacher Award.

She taught literature, composition, creative as well as critical writing, and journalism. Her research included cultural, literary, theater and culinary history, on which she has written for scholarly and popular publications and had regularly been invited to speak at international conferences and symposiums.

She was twice a recipient of the Fulbright Asian Scholar in Residence Award (1983, Ohio University Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute; 1992, Michigan University Seminar on Southeast Asian Literatures in Translation).

A prolific writer, she authored the Iloilo Zarzuela: 1903-1930 (1978); In Performance (1981); Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture (1994); Face to Face: The Craft of Interviewing (1995); Palabas: Essays on Philippine Theater History (1996); Fruits of thePhilippines (1997); Palayok: Philippine Food Through Time, On Site, In the Pot (2000). With Edilberto N. Alegre, she co-authored "The Writer and His Milieu (1984) and Writers and Their Milieu (1987, recipient of National Book Award); the Lasa series on dining in Manila and the provinces (1989, 1990, 1992); Sarap: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture (1988); and Kinilaw: A Philippine Cuisine of Freshness (1991).

She wrote video scripts as well: Tikim, a video documentary on Philippine food (1989, Philippine Information Agency); Panitikan on Philippine literature (1992, CCP), which earned first prize, video documentary category from the Film Academy of the Philippines; and Dulaan on Philippine contemporary theater (1994, CCP).

She was a columnist of The Manila Chronicle, Mr. & Ms. magazine, the Philippine Journal of Education, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and Food magazine. She has contributed numerous articles in journals, periodicals and books, including to The Oxford Companion to Food (1999, Oxford University Press).

She was editor and contributor to the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art (1994, Cultural Center of the Philippines); contributor to the Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (1995, Routledge), and with Resil Mojares to Modern Southeast Asian Literature in Translation: A Resource for Teaching (1997, Arizona State University); and editorial consultant as well as contributor to the 10-volume Kasaysayan: The Story of the Filipino People (1998, Asia Publishing Co Ltd).

She was co-founder of the Babaylan Theater Group (1973, with Nicanor G. Tiongson), and the Cultural Research Association of the Philippines (1975). She was a member of the board of trustees of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA), and the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, among others. She was also a member of the Manila Critics Circleand of the judiciary for the Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.

She received the Achievement Award from the National Research Council in 1997, and in 1999 she was recognized with the CCP Centennial Honors for the Arts (Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Philippine Centennial Commission), honoring 100 Filipinos who helped shape the arts in the Philippines in the last century (1898-1998).

She was married to interior designer Wili Fernandez.

Photograph by Stella Kalaw.

Practicing pokin'wordsplayw/pinch/punch of performancEa®thistor/y on and off the page, in and out of his mindbody, DeNNiSOmeRa is a writerliPOethink®, nEOnotsoPOst.©o.lOnial FOet/schola®©tivisavista, FOst.©o.lOnial FOetal.

Born in Baguio City, Benguet Province, Luzon Island on the archipelago known in the second language of its colonization as the Philippines, Dennis emigrated in his mother's lap to the US when he was eleven months old. He grew up His growth wa s tunted in the intolerance/ignorance of Sacramento, CA, the larger US misrepresentations and omissions of Asian/Pilipino-American from literature, history, media, and authority/leadershiPositions. Eventually he was borne by the ink and movement of the pen on page then toncescreened through keyboard, the act of writing performing his ontology through and in spite of WEstern eUrocentric olonialimperial assimilationist, objectifying, appropriative logics.

After graduating from UCSanta Cruz, then migrating to San FranciscOakland where he worked with youth for several years, he returned to the Philippines (and Southeast Asia) for the firstime since his i'mmigration. At an aRts festival in his birthplace, he participated in poetry and video workshops. After nine months in the Philippines and three traveling in Southeast Asia, he returned to the US, where he continued to grow his writing & performancEa® th r ough workshops, open mics and performance opportunities back in the SF Bay Area via June Jordan's Poetry for the People at UCBerkeley, Glide Memorial Church and the Mission Cultural Center in SF, the Ohana Open Mic in Oakland, Kearny Street Workshop in SF and a PilipinoAM theater based in SF, SOMA's Bindlestiff Studios.

Following a year at California College of Arts and Crafts, he found Mills College in Oakland to be the place where his thoroughandling of language were most at home. Through Mills, he not only refined a praxis of experimentaLANGUAGE writing to represent his thoughts poetically in the M.F.A.––but also during performance collaborations w/experimental musicians and dancers in/out of his mindbody––he continUed to further the process and perFORMance of language beyond the page: sowing seeds for his present pursuit of a Ph.D. in Performance Studies at UCDavis. Dennis' writing has been published online and off in poetry journals Tinfish, Chain, Cricket Online Review, Bay Poetics, POMPOM, 2nd Avenue Poetry, Deep Oakland. His morecent wordsplaying has been focused just off screen in a film narration performance called movietelling(Lew)/Katsuben (a silent film era Japanese form(oreso the Korean Pyonsa who subverted Japanese propaganda films in their colonial era there), performing his mov[i.e.]telling work nationally in NYC, Miami, Oakland SF.

Elaine Castillo was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and currently lives in southeast London. Her writing can be found or is forthcoming at make/shift magazine, The Rumpus, [PANK] Magazine and Feminist Review, among others. She is also a board member of Digital Desperados, a Glasgow-based film collective for women of color. At the end of March, one of her short films was screened at The Future Weird, a Brooklyn-based film series run by Derica Shields and Megan Eardly, devoted to films exploring non-Western futurisms. She is currently at work on a novel, A Filipineia.

Michael Arcega is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. Though visual, his art revolves largely around language. Directly informed by historic events, material significance, and the format of jokes, his subject matter deals with sociopolitical circumstances where power relations are unbalanced.

Michael has a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. from Stanford University. His work has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Cue Arts Foundation, and the Asia Society in New York among many others. He was recently awarded a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Michael is currently a Resident Fellow at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska.

Michael Arcega is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. Though visual, his art revolves largely around language. Directly informed by historic events, material significance, and the format of jokes, his subject matter deals with sociopolitical circumstances where power relations are unbalanced.

Michael has a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. from Stanford University. His work has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Cue Arts Foundation, and the Asia Society in New York among many others. He was recently awarded a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Michael is currently a Resident Fellow at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska.